Since on (reduced) battery power they could hang in orbit for 3 days but on less than full crystal power they could only hang in orbit for 10 hours I suspect that there is something different about the planet in "The Alternative Factor" that can pull down the ship faster or requires more power to maintain orbit.

One possibility is that the orbit will decay very slowly in both cases (or even not decay at all if precautions are taken), but that in "Mudd's Women" they discuss the actual crash, while in "The Alternative Factor" they speak of when the orbital decay will start (10 hours), not when it will conclude in a crash (3 days).

And for the record, I wasn't suggesting that author intent should outweigh the revisions that GR and the story editors routinely made on submitted scripts to keep them consistent with the intended vision of the show.

On my part, I wasn't suggesting that author intent is uninteresting in any absolute sense. It's just that I'm personally solely oriented towards analyzing the end result that is Star Trek, the fictional universe that is the result of author effort - and more often than not, said effort is not particularly visible in said end result, nor should it be (for what good is fiction if the seams are showing?). I certainly cannot accept the idea that, after the visible part of the fictional universe is taken in, various invisible elements of author intent should be added merely because they are not contradicted by what we see. This would seriously limit our options in interpreting the fictional universe - just like it would seriously limit the options of people intent on creating new elements into the universe, such as future screenplay writers.

Or alternatively, Kirk's cabin was on Deck 12 in "Mudd's Women" and his yeoman's cabin, Rand's, was also on Deck 12 in "The Enemy Within" suggesting that in the early days Kirk's cabin was on Deck 12 and he didn't relocate to Deck 5 until later.

Which is a good take on continuity, since the mention of Deck 5 was associated with a situation that in the Star Trek universe does involve cabin reshuffling. There was a diplomatic party onboard, and in "Elaan of Troyius" such an occurrence meant a top officer had to swap cabins. "Journey to Babel" just happens to be a hundred times worse than "Elaan of Troyius" for our officers, because there are a hundred times more delegates!

Writer intent would not allow for this sort of thing, as "Babel" precedes "Troyius". But in-universe facts are in harmony here, regardless of and perhaps even against writer intent.